Allen looked at Jenny. “You working Sunday?” he asked.
“No,” she replied. “Maggie James has got that shift, and as nosy as she is, with you and two strangers she’d be snooping around and telling tales. You better meet someplace else.”
“She’s right,” said Allen. “You’d better come to my place. Can you be there by noon or so?”
The other men agreed to the time and place. They all left the bar together. As they walked through the lobby, Clarence nodded to them.
“Take care, Allen,” he said as if he were just making a pleasantry.
Just before Billy drove away in a beat-up Cadillac, Wickersham rolled down the passenger window and yelled to Allen, “See you next time, boy!”
“Boy” again. Damn him. He’d show them.
The next Sunday morning Allen kept Jenny in bed until almost noon. She was just making coffee when they heard a loud knock and an unmistakable voice squawking, “Hey, Allen! You in there, boy?”
They had not dressed yet, and Allen tried to get Jenny to answer the door in the nude, to show the men how sophisticated they were. One of his “Beta Bunnies” had done that to his collector in July, and it had blown the man’s mind so bad it was after Labor Day before he quit making up excuses to drop by every weekend.
Jenny just said, “Don’t be silly, Allen,” jerked on one of his T-shirts, and let the bootleggers in, all of them laughing at Allen as he struggled into his shorts.
The three men sat down around Allen’s dinette table. Wicker-sham drew a roll of cash from his pocket and started to peel off bills.
“You said $2,640 would cover what you got in this? Okay. Here it is. That leaves about $7,300. Me ’n’ ol’ Billy got about $1,300 in sugar, corn, barrels, and a small gift to a friendly sheriff. So there’s—say—$6,000 to divide. Here’s your third.”
He counted off another $2,000 and gave it to Allen.
“Two thousand dollars,” Allen said, holding his profit in his upraised hand. “Not bad for a one-week investment of somebody else’s money.”
Billy laughed, and Wickersham snorted. “Hell. If me and Billy could get going right away, we could turn $15,000 into $50,000 in a month or less. But if we can’t do it soon, we’ll never make it.”
“How’s that?” Allen asked.
“If we had that kind of money, we could add more barrels, speed up production, buy a big old truck, and make a real gift to the sheriff. We could make and sell a $50,000 load and be in and out before Old Perk even knows we’re there. When we got in this, we thought my friend Johnson was going to put up most of the cash, but now he’s gone missing and here we are with nothing but a few thousand bucks and a few barrels. Even that beat-up little truck you helped us get is probably too hot to use again.
“See, you can’t build up gradual when you’re moonshining around Old Perk’s territory. You have to get in and out fast or forget it. I guess it’s time for us to forget it.”
Allen hated to ask one more naive question, but he had to know. “Who’s Old Perk, some kind of federal agent?”
Both older men laughed. Even Jenny giggled, although Allen doubted that she had any more idea who Old Perk was than he did.
“Old Perk,” said Billy, “is Adam Perkinson. He’s the biggest danged moonshiner on the East Coast.”
“He’s the biggest in the whole country,” said Wickersham. “And the Carolinas are his home territory. He owns it like the mob owns Jersey. And if you’re moonshining in his territory, he’ll wipe you out. If you’re small, he’ll let you alone, not even pay any attention to you.
But if you get big enough to make some real money—” he drew his open hand across his throat like a knife.
“How would he wipe you out?” Jenny asked.
Allen noticed they didn’t laugh when Jenny asked a question.
“He wouldn’t do it himself,” Wickersham answered. “He used to have his boys dynamite the still, maybe shoot the stillhands. But he doesn’t need to take that kind of chance any more. Now he lets the sheriff do it.”
“I thought you were going to buy the sheriff,” said Allen.
This time Wickersham didn’t laugh at Allen. He just shook his head sadly and said, “They don’t stay bought. If you pay his asking price, he’s got to let you get one good load out or nobody will ever do business with him again. But once you’ve got that one load out, he’s up for bids again, and Perk can outbid us every time. Since Johnson is missing and presumed permanently unavailable, we’re going to abandon ship, take our meager earnings, and get out of business.”
By then Jenny had served sandwiches and coffee all around and joined them at the table. They ate in a mix of silence and small talk.
“It’s been a pleasant meal, Jenny,” said Wickersham. “And a pleasant venture, Allen. Now Billy and I need to take our little profit and find something better to do than push small loads of whiskey out of a few miserable barrels. And you, my boy, need to get back to helping old ladies buy Chevrolets.”
“Wait a minute, Webb,” said Allen. “You and Billy have $4,000. You just need $11,000 more, right?”
Webb shook his head. “No, my boy, we need $15,000. We’ve made little enough out of this venture. We’re not risking what little there is. Unless an angel with $15,000 in his wings flies down and gives it to us, we’re out of the business.”
“Look, old man,” said Allen, glancing at Jenny as he tried out a new way to deal with being called boy, “I think I could do it. I could roll that loan we’ve got on the books now and add three or four more. If you can get a load out in a month, there wouldn’t be any problem. I’d want $20,000 off the top to cover the loans and my trouble. That should leave us $10,000 apiece on a one-month investment.”
“No,” said Wickersham. “You’ve made your one fast run with the foxes. Go back and sleep in the hutch where it’s safe. I can’t be a party to your taking that kind of risk.”
“What kind of risk is there really?” asked Allen. “You said the sheriff would have to let you make one good run, and Old Perk doesn’t take chances on using violence himself.”
“There’s always risk in every enterprise, and a lot more in an illegal one,” said Wide Webb. “You get strung out on your company’s money to the tune of 15,000 bucks and something goes wrong, you’re done for. That’s as much as they pay you in—what—two years?”
“Two and a half,” said Allen. “That’s why I need the $10,000 I can make in a month on this. Don’t worry about me, old man, I can cover my tracks at the company. Let me get you the money and give us all a chance to make a score.”
“Yeah, Webb,” said Billy. “You ain’t his daddy. When you and me was his age, we was already pulling off some pretty good deals.”
Jenny had hopped up to get more coffee. She set the pot down, bent over, and grabbed Wickersham by the neck with both hands. She pretended to choke him.
“You give Al a chance to make some money, or you won’t get any more coffee,” she said.
The fat man hung his tongue out and made choking sounds. He gasped out, “I give up. I give up. If he wants to take the risk, I want to take the money. Now give me my damned coffee.”
By Tuesday evening Allen had it done.
He had paid off the Chevrolet loan and entered on the books three new auto loans and a signatory note in the name of a fictitious doctor. Together the four totaled just over $17,000, with $15,000 net to the borrowers. That gave him enough to give his partners what they needed and still have $2,000 on hand to make any necessary payments on the loans if the profit was slower than expected.
Wednesday he took Webb, Billy, and Jenny around to three different branch banks to cash out the car loans. He ran the signatory loan proceeds through his own account. That was a little risky, but none of his partners looked enough like a doctor to introduce to a banker as one. Finally he gave Wickersham all the cash in return for the Wide One’s assurance that he would have $50,000 in four weeks, thirty days tops.
For twenty
days, Allen managed to feel pretty good. By the twenty-fifth he wasn’t eating well. By the twenty-eighth he wasn’t sleeping at all, worrying all night about what would happen if Webb and Billy didn’t come back.
On the morning of the thirtieth day, well before sunrise, Webb Wickersham did come back. But he didn’t have Billy with him, and he didn’t have $50,000 to divide. He came banging on Allen’s door, screaming, “Allen, let me in, boy, for God’s sake, hurry!”
Allen unlocked the door, and the big man almost knocked him down rushing in. He was flushed and shaking. His breath came in great rasping pants.
“Billy’s dead,” he blurted out before Allen could speak. “Old Perk came in with a bunch of men while we were loading. I was off in the woods, and I hid, but they shot Billy and a black guy we had helping us load. Blew the bodies up with the still, so the sheriff won’t even call it murder. Just say two stillhands got blown up with their still.”
Webb’s voice choked off into sobs for a moment. Allen was too shocked even to speak.
Finally he said, “What am I going to do, Webb? I’ve lost $15,000 of the company’s money.”
“To hell with money, boy. Billy’s dead, and Perk’s liable to kill me if he figures out that I’m in on it. You’re lucky. Perk doesn’t know you. I’ve got a thou left. Half of it’s yours. I’ll need the rest to run on.” He handed Allen five $100 bills and patted him on the shoulder. “I’ve got to put some miles between me and Ol’ Perk. If you keep rolling those loans over, you’ll be okay in time.”
He was gone as fast as he’d come.
A few hours later Allen called the office and told Sherry he was sick. She offered to close the office to come take care of him, but he ordered her not to, telling her he would be going to a doctor. Instead, he spent the day figuring.
With what Webb had given him and what he had held out of the loan proceeds, he had just enough to pay off the signatory loan and make payments on the car loans for a couple of months. If he sold his car and his equity in the cottage, he could pay off one more loan. Then he could move to a ratty apartment in town, walk to work, and by living like a miser afford payments on the other two loans.
If he did all that and it all worked as he planned, he could pay the last two loans off in three years. Even then there was the risk that someone in the company would learn of his change in lifestyle, pull a full audit on his office, and have him prosecuted for fraud or embezzlement. Even a routine audit could do it, especially if someone noticed that four recent loans all had post office box addresses.
If he rolled the loans occasionally, he could spread the payments, but the new carrying charges would make his balance bigger and leave him exposed longer. The sooner he could get the loans off the books, the better his chances of surviving undetected. He had a desperate idea. He would marry Jenny.
Not only would such a marriage give him her earnings to add to his and hurry the payout, but he thought he could cut expenses that way. He knew two couldn’t really live as cheaply as one, but he figured half of two lives more cheaply than one living alone, especially since Jenny had a little efficiency apartment at the motel that Clarence let her live in dirt cheap. Allen could move in with her cheaper than anywhere he could find by himself. He drove to the inn to tell her about Webb and Billy and start selling her on the marriage idea. But as he dashed through the lobby, Clarence called out to him. “If you’re looking for Jenny, she don’t work here anymore.”
“She, uh, she … you fired her?” Allen stammered.
“No,” said Clarence. “I didn’t fire her. She just up and quit. Come in here an hour before her shift was supposed to start and drew her pay. I had to call Maggie James in without warning. Had to pay her overtime to get her to come. You know any girl looking for a job?”
“No,” said Allen. “Did Jenny say where she was going?”
“Said she was going back home,” said Clarence. “But I don’t believe her. I think she’s taking off with Webb Wickersham.”
Allen tried to sound uninterested. “Why would she leave with that ugly lump of lard?” he asked.
Clarence snorted. “No man’s ugly to that little chickie when he’s got a wad of money on his hip.”
Allen would at least show Clarence he knew something about running with the foxes. He forced himself to laugh as he said, “Webb hasn’t got any money. Ol’ Perk blew up his still and killed his partner.”
“His still!” Clarence hooted. “He ain’t never had a still. That hasn’t kept him from selling part interest in one to suckers all up and down the East Coast, but he ain’t never had one.”
It dawned on Allen for the first time that when foxes feast they must always invite one rabbit.
CLYDE HAYWOOD is the pseudonym of Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Judge Sentelle published several short stories before his “secret identity” was disclosed by an investigative reporter for the Legal Times in 2003 after the publication of his nonfiction first book, Judge Dave and the Rainbow People, under his own name. Judge Sentelle graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law, has practiced privately, has served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Charlotte, has taught in two law schools, and has held three judicial seats, including his current position.
Copyright 1993 by Clyde Haywood. First printed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1993. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Maniac Loose
Michael Malone
Holding a yellow smiley-face coffee mug, Lucy Rhoads sat in her dead husband’s bathrobe and looked at two photographs. She had just made a discovery about her recently deceased spouse that surprised her. Prewitt Rhoads—a booster of domestic sanguinity, whose mind was a map of cheerful clichés out of which his thoughts never wandered, whose monogamy she had no more doubted than his optimism—her spouse Prewitt Rhoads (dead three weeks ago of a sudden heart attack) had for years lived a secret life of sexual deceit with a widow two blocks away in the pretty subdivision of Painton, Alabama, where he had insisted on their living for reasons Lucy only now understood. This was the same man who had brought her home Mylar balloons proclaiming “I Love You,” white cuddly Valentine bears making the same claims, and an endless series of these smiley-face coffee mugs—all from the gifts, cards, and party supplies shop he owned in Annie Sullivan Mall that was called The Fun House. This was the same man who had disparaged her slightest criticism of the human condition, who had continually urged her, “Lucy, can’t you stop turning over rocks just to look at all the bugs crawling underneath them?”
Well, now Lucy had tripped over a boulder of a rock to see in the exposed mud below her own Prewitt Rhoads scurrying around in lustful circles with their widowed neighbor Amorette Strumlander, Lucy’s mediocre Gardenia Club bridge partner for more than fifteen years; Amorette Strumlander who had dated Prewitt long ago at Painton High School, who had never lived anywhere in her life but Painton, Alabama, where perhaps for years she had sat patiently waiting, like the black widow she’d proved herself to be, until Prewitt came back to her. Of course, on his timid travels into the world beyond Painton, Alabama, Amorette’s old boyfriend had picked up a wife in Charlotte (Lucy) and two children in Atlanta before returning to his hometown to open The Fun House. But what did Amorette Strumlander care about those encumbrances? Apparently nothing at all.
Lucy poured black coffee into the grimacing cup. Soon Amorette herself would tap her horn in her distinctive pattern, honk honk honk pause honk honk, to take Lucy to the Playhouse in nearby Tuscumbia so they could see The Miracle Worker together. Lucy was free to go because she had been forced to accept a leave of absence from her job as a town clerk at Painton Municipal Hall in order to recover from her loss. Amorette had insisted on the phone that The Miracle Worker would be just the thing to cheer up the grieving Mrs. Rhoads after the sudden loss of her husband to his unexpected heart attack. “I always thought it would be me,” said Amorette, who’d boasted of a heart murmur since i
t had forced her to drop out of Agnes Scott College for Women when she was twenty and kept her from getting a job or doing any housework ever since. Apparently, Lucy noted, the long affair with Prewitt hadn’t strained the woman’s heart at all.
Lucy wasn’t at all interested in seeing The Miracle Worker; she had already seen it a number of times, for the Playhouse put it on every summer in Tuscumbia, where the famous blind deaf mute Helen Keller had grown up. The bordering town of Painton had no famous people to boast of in its own long hot languid history and no exciting events either; not even the Yankees ever came through the hamlet to burn it down, although a contingent of Confederate women (including an ancestor of Amorette’s) was waiting to shoot them if they did. A typical little Deep South community, Painton had run off its Indians, brought in its slaves, made its money on cotton, and then, after the War between the States, gone to sleep for a hundred years except for a few little irritable spasms of wakefulness over the decades to burn a cross or (on the other side) to send a student to march with Martin Luther King or to campaign against anything that might destroy the American Way of Life.
In its long history, Painton could claim only three modest celebrities. There was Amorette Strumlander’s twice-great-grandmother who’d threatened to shoot the Yankees if they ever showed up; she’d been a maid of honor at Jefferson Davis’s wedding and had attended his inauguration as president of the Confederacy in Montgomery. Fifty years later there was a Baptist missionary killed in the Congo either by a hippopotamus or by hepatitis; it was impossible for his relatives to make out his wife’s handwriting on the note she’d sent from Africa. And thirty years ago there was a linebacker in an Alabama Rose Bowl victory who’d played an entire quarter with a broken collarbone.
But of course none of these celebrities could hold a candle to Helen Keller, as even Amorette admitted—proud as she was of her ancestral acquaintance of Jefferson Davis. Indeed no one loved the Helen Keller story as told by The Miracle Worker more than she. “You can never ever get too much of a good thing, Lucy, especially in your time of need,” Mrs. Strumlander had wheedled when she’d called to pester Lucy into going to the play today. “The Miracle Worker shows how we can triumph over the dark days even if we’re blind, deaf, and dumb, poor little thing.”
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